It would really be beneficial for members to read an article by Dan Buettner who has been researching longevity and talks about the Greek island of Ikaria:NYTimes: The Island Where People Forget to DieThe entire allopathic model is essentially geared to modeling sickness and disease, not health, so most are sadly ignorant of the factors that actually contribute to good health. In that article you will learn that the reason why Ikaria is a pocket of longevity is because it has been isolated from the normal shipping lanes of Greek islands for longer, that the people there dislike clocks and watches which reduces the tyranny and stress of mechanically measured time, that they relax, exercise frequently by walking or gardening, that they often nap, eat a mostly plant based diet, have strong community(which Greeks have a more encompassing term for κοινωνία). So what makes you live longer, must almost necessarily be bad for the God of almost everyone in this forum pretending to be Buddhist or atheist, economic Growth.

Medical canon has little or no mechanisms to recognize that people have dysfunctional families, poor paying jobs that also have an associated low social status, lack of community, no true friends, that they live in environmentally degraded areas, etc. It cannot factor in social and other conditions caused largely by capitalism, since the medical field is structured to ignore that people are sacrificed as externalities to economic growth. If things were otherwise, health professionals like doctors, psychiatrists, therapists, physicians, surgeons would have to be at the forefront of fighting economic growth by primitive accumulation, capitalist maximization and other methods. Instead the medical fields systematically teach their too numerous victims that their health is bad because of their personal failings manifested as an innate genetic defects unique to themselves and not situated anywhere in actual social space-time or as Buddhists would say, independently arising. That is a grave crime... The system is designed, so that when you are down, if you are poor, you are mentally damaged, you are genetically predisposed to disease, it is your fault. Thus medical victims are not recognized as the sacred sacrifice to the God of Growth. Too convenient.

Here is an example from a totally alien type of society to ours, where sickness could not be perceived as individual or arising from the discrete and separate self:

We can hardly conceive of an origin of life that does not start with an original living creature, discrete and separate from its environment, because that is how we conceive an organism, a "being". Yet other cultures recognized a more fluid identity in which the defining unit was the family, the tribe, the village, the forest. The very meaning of "I" is culturally determined. The shaman Martin Prechtel speaks of a culture in which a person beseeching a medicine man to cure his ailing wife says not, "My wife is sick" but rather, "My family is sick."V The sickness is as much his own as his wife's. Or if a few individuals in the village are sick, he might say, "My village is sick." Even if a Western doctor might judge him a magnificent specimen of bodily health, he would not agree with the statement "I am healthy" because to him, "I" means something different than it does to us. Its boundaries are more fluid. For him to say, "I am healthy but my family, village, forest, or world is sick" would be as absurd as to say, "I am healthy but my liver, kidneys, and heart are sick." Someone immersed in such a culture might not see the appearance of a replicator as the key event in biogenesis at all.

V. Talk to the Green Gathering conference, September 2003.

Overall the medical profession does mostly net harm in anything outside of emergency care(IE. If I saw off my finger, they are excellent at sewing it back) and their purpose is to adjust people to capitalist growth and progress. You don't see many doctors out there at the front line presenting medical objections against pollution from the new factory opening near a residential area, opposing new highways which will cause lung problems from all the increased particulate matter in the air, opposing the increasing work hours most people are undertaking which always takes a bodily and psychic toll, opposing nuclear plants, or doing anything in general to promote health in a preventative matter. Actually there are a few exceptions which I could name, but they are too few. What they do instead is damage control for the God of Growth on the tail end by dis-empowering people from taking steps to prevent health problems before they arise, emphasizing an approach laden with invasive testing, pharmacology and surgery. If it were otherwise every time anything that leads to more growth or commerce would be proposed to be built, the doctors and physicians would have to take the lead in preventing it on the grounds it is an obstacle that would have be subsidized in terms of public and private health, less life expectancy, and that it would cause more stress and decrease life satisfaction.

Everyone has a physician inside him or her; we just have to help it in its work. The natural healing force within each one of us is the greatest force in getting well. Our food should be our medicine. Our medicine should be our food. But to eat when you are sick is to feed your sickness.

Today that sounds so quaint and foreign to modern ears. In 1910 business interests interests conspired in the United States to release the Flexner report which backed by the American Medical Association cartel, created the modern allopathic system based on the public as passive observers consuming only pharmacological pills and surgery. Thus today on average American doctors receive only 23.9 hours contact hours on nutrition during their whole mis-education. Now if Hippocrates was really the founder of medicine and doctors were really on our side in terms of health, would this be the case? Health in our society is not something you participate in via your diet or lifestyle, it is something you consume as an insipid type of dis-empowered consumer known as a medical patient. They cannot question the social construct of food, which allows food conglomerates to make huge profits by allowing the public to be mislead that any processed or pre-cooked garbage from company A is good as company B.

The door to the doctor's office ought to bear a surgeon general's warning that routine physical examinations are dangerous to your health. Why? Because doctors do not see themselves as guardians of health, and they have learned precious little about how to assure it. Instead, they are latter-day Don Quixotes, battling sometimes real but too often imaginary diseases. The disastrous difference is that doctors are not tilting at windmills. Rather, it is people who are damaged by their insistent search for dubious diseases to conquer.

Greed plays a role in causing unnecessary surgery, although I don't think the economic motive alone is enough to explain it. There's no doubt that if you eliminated all unnecessary surgery, most surgeons would go out of business. They'd have to look for honest work, because the surgeon gets paid when he performs surgery on you, not when you're treated some other way. In pre-paid group practices where surgeons are paid a steady salary not tied to how many operations they perform, hysterectomies and tonsillectomies occur only about one-third as often as in fee-for-service situations." ---- Robert S. Mendelsohn, MD. Confessions of a Medical Heretic (1979) Chapter 3 ("Ritual Mutilations"), pp. 58-59.

Medical students are further softened up by being maliciously fatigued. The way to weaken a person’s will in order to mold him to suit your purposes is to make him work hard, especially at night, and never give him a chance to recover. You teach the rat to race. The result is a person too weak to resist the most debilitating instrument medical school uses on its students: fear. If I had to characterize doctors, I would say their major psychological attribute is fear. They have a drive to achieve security-plus that’s never satisfied because of all the fear that’s drummed into them in medical school: fear of failure, fear of missing a diagnosis, fear of malpractice, fear of remarks by their peers, fear that they’ll have to find honest work. There was a movie some time ago that opened with a marathon dance contest. After a certain length of time all the contestants were eliminated except one. Everybody had to fail except the winner. That’s what medical school has become. Since everybody can’t win, everybody suffers from a loss of self-esteem. Everybody comes out of medical school feeling bad.Doctors are given one reward for swallowing the fear pill so willingly and for sacrificing the healing instincts and human emotions that might help their practice: arrogance. To hide their fear, they’re taught to adopt the authoritarian attitude and demeanor of their professors. Confessions of a Medical Heretic

Doctors turn out to be dishonest, corrupt, unethical, sick, poorly educated, and downright stupid more often than the rest of society. When I meet a doctor, I generally figure I'm meeting a person who is narrowminded, prejudiced, and fairly incapable of reasoning and deliberation. Few of the doctors I meet prove my prediction wrong.

It's the worst. I often-refer to contemporary or "modern" "medicine" as a racket. Same goes for contemporary science in general, as it is mostly—rather than being 'objective'/unbiased—controlled by the corporatocracy's/corporate-dictatorship's greed/money. If we could say that there's a such thing as evil, the FDA, Monsanto, big-pharma, etc. practically embody it.

Lhug-Pa wrote:It's the worst. I often-refer to contemporary or "modern" "medicine" as a racket.

Which, I hope, is not the same as saying that there are NO genuinely concerned and patient-oriented health care practitioners en-mired in that "racket" and trying, sometimes in vain. to work around it.

If they can sever like and dislike, along with greed, anger, and delusion, regardless of their difference in nature, they will all accomplish the Buddha Path.. ~ Sutra of Complete Enlightenment

Yep, many feel just this way until they have been sick enough to need allopathic treatment, then you get to see it's redeeming values, all the sudden when your choices are to go with that medicine or die, not walk, face dialysis etc., and all alternative treatments have yielded no results, then the world is a much different place. Amusing to me that 9 times out of 10 it is those who are young enough to have never needed any kind of triage medicine who make this sort of tunnel-vision argument about healthcare.

I agree that allopathic medicine is limited in many ways of course, and lifestyle, nutrition, prevention in general etc. are paid far too little heed in it, but making an overall statement about it's "purpose" is lunacy, much less making grandiose, sweeping claims about any and all people involved in it. If there is any critique to be made here it's a critique of medical care under capitalism, not of the methods themselves.

Johnny Dangerous wrote:Yep, many feel just this way until they have been sick enough to need allopathic treatment, then you get to see it's redeeming values, all the sudden when your choices are to go with that medicine or die, not walk, face dialysis etc., and all alternative treatments have yielded no results, then the world is a much different place. Amusing to me that 9 times out of 10 it is those who are young enough to have never needed any kind of triage medicine who make this sort of tunnel-vision argument about healthcare.

I agree that allopathic medicine is limited in many ways of course, and lifestyle, nutrition, prevention in general etc. are paid far too little heed in it, but making an overall statement about it's "purpose" is lunacy, much less making grandiose, sweeping claims about any and all people involved in it. If there is any critique to be made here it's a critique of medical care under capitalism, not of the methods themselves.

+1

Exactly how many hours have you spent cleaning up shit, vomit, putrid wounds, or sitting at the bedside of the dying, or being reamed out by a family member because the jello was red instead of green or the pillow was too hard? Spend about 25 years doing that and then come back and tell us about "health care."

I'm not saying that there aren't any people in the contemporary healthcare industry doing their best to turn things around. I'm sure there are, and I commend them for that. I'm also glad for the people who have been treated by the contemporary healthcare industry because they had no other choice and actually somehow benefitted from contemporary healthcare.

Nonetheless, much of what Thrasymachus has posted here is true. There's no denying that the contemporary healthcare industry is a racket, because it is one; especially the big-pharma aspect of it. The Hippocratic Oath that these doctors supposedly take is pretty much out the window in most cases.

We don't need pills made out of synthetic-chemicals, vaccines, rampant corporatism, and processed, irradiated, GMO & pesticide contaminated food. What we need is natural healthy organically grown food, plenty of sun and exercise, Yoga (preferably not contemporary watered-down pop-hatha-yoga), healthy sleep-patterns, at least some form of Meditation, and traditional Ayurvedic/Tibetan Medicine, etc.

Last edited by Lhug-Pa on Fri Nov 09, 2012 9:32 pm, edited 4 times in total.

I'm all for all those things, but all the better if they exist with contemporary methods of saving the life of people who would otherwise be even more miserable or dead.

I'm not denying that there is some, even a great deal of truth to what he posted, only that it is being seen with tunnel-vision, there is no "big plan" behind modern medicine, it's the interplay of many different things, some of which were around long before contemporary capitalism created some of the predicaments you mention, such as dependency on endlessly recycled versions of often useless antidepressants.

Also, alternative medicine (speaking as a practitioner here, one who also sees a Naturopath as primary care) is also most definitely full of snake oil salesmen who are only after money, and the well-meaning but misguided who think they "just know" something works better than standard treatment. An unfortunate consequence of much of the "anti no matter what" attitude in much alternative medicine is that a huge number of practitioners and patients who refuse to adopt evidence-based practices in the first place, which makes any argument they have about the mainstream medical establishment difficult to listen to.

I don't wish to cause controversy, so I will not name them, but there are "alternative health" websites out there that do things like willingly publish articles by thoroughly discredited people who knowingly defraud dying cancer patients with nonsense cures, and similar reprehensible actions.. allopathic medicine is far from the only medicine guilty of the systemic economic abuse and exploitation of sick people.

I'd ike to go on record as saying that this thread is about the most ridiculous, paranoid conspiracy theory I have ever run across.

The medical profession probably brought every one of us into the world safely, tended to us better than our own mothers, has patiently and expertly fixed our bad teeth, cuts and bangs, and all round prevented a life of medeival misery for all of us.

To suggest that these actions are part of some capitalist conspiracy is outright insane. To turn on your dedicated benefactors, well you might as well kill your own mother while you're at it if you are that paranoid. If you think you know better how to care for people's health than the people who have saved us all from leprosy, cholera, smallpox, polio, diptheria and hundreds of other diseases. none of which you can cure yourself.... well

Johnny Dangerous wrote:Yep, many feel just this way until they have been sick enough to need allopathic treatment, then you get to see it's redeeming values, all the sudden when your choices are to go with that medicine or die, not walk, face dialysis etc., and all alternative treatments have yielded no results, then the world is a much different place. Amusing to me that 9 times out of 10 it is those who are young enough to have never needed any kind of triage medicine who make this sort of tunnel-vision argument about healthcare.

I agree that allopathic medicine is limited in many ways of course, and lifestyle, nutrition, prevention in general etc. are paid far too little heed in it, but making an overall statement about it's "purpose" is lunacy, much less making grandiose, sweeping claims about any and all people involved in it. If there is any critique to be made here it's a critique of medical care under capitalism, not of the methods themselves.

Um, okay? Who made the argument that allopathic medicine was useless?

The fact is that having specialised disease treatment as your primary system of health care is completely absurd, and it's obvious that the system is only set up that way for economic-political reasons. When you get sick enough to need allopathic treatment, then you see the redeeming values of having a healthy lifestyle to prevent disease in the first place.

Johnny Dangerous wrote:Yep, many feel just this way until they have been sick enough to need allopathic treatment, then you get to see it's redeeming values, all the sudden when your choices are to go with that medicine or die, not walk, face dialysis etc., and all alternative treatments have yielded no results, then the world is a much different place. Amusing to me that 9 times out of 10 it is those who are young enough to have never needed any kind of triage medicine who make this sort of tunnel-vision argument about healthcare.

I agree that allopathic medicine is limited in many ways of course, and lifestyle, nutrition, prevention in general etc. are paid far too little heed in it, but making an overall statement about it's "purpose" is lunacy, much less making grandiose, sweeping claims about any and all people involved in it. If there is any critique to be made here it's a critique of medical care under capitalism, not of the methods themselves.

Um, okay? Who made the argument that allopathic medicine was useless?

The fact is that having specialised disease treatment as your primary system of health care is completely absurd, and it's obvious that the system is only set up that way for economic-political reasons. When you get sick enough to need allopathic treatment, then you see the redeeming values of having a healthy lifestyle to prevent disease in the first place.

Disease can be caused by a number of things completely unrelated to healthy lifestyle...

I am beyond disappointed, I took a quite some time to gather serious sources and made nuanced arguments to open people's mind to something they should have noticed anyway around them via mere personal observation and inference anyway. But only two people, Thus-gone and Lhug-pa, showed even hints of reading or understanding it, in an Alternative Health sub-forum on a Buddhist site, no less.

I have noticed a problem often on this site. In superhero comics, you have Clark Kent who escapes aways to dress up and act as Superman. Alot of people on this site remind me of that, they tend to argue like the supernatural claims of Buddhist canon are true stories -- maybe we can call this the dharma-man phase. But when a topic like orthodox medicine comes up, the Clark Kent aspect comes up and orthodox medicine is inherently real -- which is probably how they act around most their real life acquaintances. Personally in real life, I argue the same type of things I argue here if given the opportunity, I don't live in such discursion. Catmoon, however seems to have the opposite problem, he is too caught up into mainstream orthodoxy, materialism and scientific-ism.

justsit wrote:Exactly how many hours have you spent cleaning up shit, vomit, putrid wounds, or sitting at the bedside of the dying, or being reamed out by a family member because the jello was red instead of green or the pillow was too hard? Spend about 25 years doing that and then come back and tell us about "health care."

Your response really torpedoes and buries into a deep-sea shipwreck, allopathic medicine, and sadly you don't even notice! What you are describing is not pertaining to health in any sense of the word, rather it sounds like sick care. What is jello? Jello is made of color dyes which are toxic, gelatin which is usually synthesized from animal matter which is known to be net disease promoting, water and some artificial sugar or corn syrup! As a health nut likely according to most here, for me putting jello in my body is largely not an option to consider, and I don't even have any chronic disease. And yet here you are hinting that you work in health-care, trying to accost others for decrying the prevailing orthodoxy, and you don't notice anything wrong with feeding the sickest people, the most nutritionally devoid, disease promoting food-like substances... Infact it is your alleged defense!

J Am Diet Assoc. 1996 Apr;96(4):361-6, 369; quiz 367-8.Malnutrition is not a new or a rare problem. In studies involving more than 1,327 hospitalized adult patients, 40% to 55% were found to be either malnourished or at risk for malnutrition, and up to 12% were severely malnourished. Surgical patients with likelihood of malnutrition are two to three times more likely to have minor and major complications as well as increased mortality; and their length of stay can be extended by 90% compared with the stay of well-nourished patients. Hospital charges are reported to be from 35% to 75% higher for malnourished patients than for well-nourished patients. Obtaining data to assess the nutritional status of patients is essential to optimal patient care, especially for patients at high risk for malnutrition. Nutrition assessment can be done with readily available and relatively inexpensive methods. But it is not enough to assess and identify malnutrition. Outcomes are improved and costs are saved only when appropriate intervention follows. This article identifies many well-conducted, published studies that support the findings that health outcomes of malnourished patients can be improved and that overall use of resources can be reduced by nutrition counseling, oral diet and oral supplements, enteral formula delivered via tube, and parenteral nutrition support via central or peripheral line. Early nutrition assessment and appropriate nutrition intervention must be accepted as essential for the delivery of quality health care. Appropriately selected nutrition support can address the problem of malnutrition, improve clinical outcomes, and help reduce the costs of health care.

Once I listened to an excellent broadcast of the Gary Null Show on radio where he interviewed Mike Adams who runs Naturalnews. I remember Adams saying that we do not have a health care system in the United States, we only have disease and sick-care system. He correctly opined that modern medicine does not help people live longer, it helps them die longer!

@All detractors:Believe me, you all put your foot in your mouths almost as bad as justsit. It is easy to likely not read what someone else writes and put out any mainstream platitude and myth out there. I am doing the exact the opposite, which takes much more time, but I will try to give more responses.

I have direct experience of being both educated, and working in the "alternative health" field, and have experienced a diversity of opinion on these and related subjects. everything you are saying here has been said by others time and again, it is not something I need to be familiarized with, as at least on some level, it was part of my education.

I am familiar with sites like Natural News, Mercola.com etc...they occasionally have good information posted, but from a perspective of alternative health that is actually concerned with evidence-based treatment rather than ideology, and what amounts to lifestyle politics zealotry, they are also full of much nonsense and have no filter for what is real and what is made up, and in some cases even fraudulent.

At any rate, this going to get circular and pointless quickly guys, i'm leaving before that happens.. thanks very much the conversation.

Well if you had relevant knowledge you could have demonstrated it in the numerous posts you made, but choose not to. So I instead get the impression you never read or understood one of my main points which was that the whole premise of modern medicine is that people should be dis-empowered consumers of specialist doctors, who get their power and prestige from disempowering others. Under this model health is not a community or personal responsibility and it has minimal environment co-factors, it is something largely out of one's hands stemming almost always from genetic factors or pre-dispositions. Thus you can only consume orthodox health services after the disease or sickness arrives. Too convenient for modern industry and commerce, if you ask me!

Further mainstream medicine is recognized as a monopoly protected by law, that is with the full weight of the judicial and police apparatuses. People actually lose legal custody of their children in this world for not believing in co-operating with dangerous allopathic, sickness promoting treatments:Sydney Morning Herald: Bitter Pills: Parents have their children taken away for refusing to subject them to mainstream medical treatmentsI don't see why on one of the few spaces to discuss Alternative Health, this type of thread should receive such a hostile reception. Am I, Thrasymachus, legally or monetarily dis-empowering people? Here is another aspect of how orthodox medical crooks ruin health and lives in my nation:

Our 2001 study in 5 states found that medical problems contributed to at least 46.2% of all bankruptcies. Since then, health costs and the numbers of un- and underinsured have increased, and bankruptcy laws have tightened.METHODS:

We surveyed a random national sample of 2314 bankruptcy filers in 2007, abstracted their court records, and interviewed 1032 of them. We designated bankruptcies as "medical" based on debtors' stated reasons for filing, income loss due to illness, and the magnitude of their medical debts.RESULTS:

Using a conservative definition, 62.1% of all bankruptcies in 2007 were medical; 92% of these medical debtors had medical debts over $5000, or 10% of pretax family income. The rest met criteria for medical bankruptcy because they had lost significant income due to illness or mortgaged a home to pay medical bills. Most medical debtors were well educated, owned homes, and had middle-class occupations. Three quarters had health insurance. Using identical definitions in 2001 and 2007, the share of bankruptcies attributable to medical problems rose by 49.6%. In logistic regression analysis controlling for demographic factors, the odds that a bankruptcy had a medical cause was 2.38-fold higher in 2007 than in 2001.CONCLUSIONS:

Illness and medical bills contribute to a large and increasing share of US bankruptcies.

Most Westerners have this sloppy ideology that tells falsely that any lifestyle choice is the same as any other. This is necessary so in the market of goods and services we can create the delusion that the choices we make don't have impact. This removes personal responsibility as a factor that could potentially harm business interests. I think most the detractors in this thread fall into that category and they don't want to take responsibility for diet or lifestyle factors and their impacts on health. Doing so would involve giving up the discrete and separate self, that is an independently originating victim of largely genetic factors according to medical orthodoxy. Being a victim with no responsibility, is very attractive for too many for some reason.

I'm not much into conspiracy theories nor lifestyle police, but there are many "ills" in allopathic medicine today, as it has been co-opted into plutocratic capitalism. That is the nature of capitalism. It is absolutely true that very few MDs understand preventative medicine or nutrition. In the US, in particular, we do pay more for very expensive dying, or, rather, trying to avoid the inevitability of death.

If they can sever like and dislike, along with greed, anger, and delusion, regardless of their difference in nature, they will all accomplish the Buddha Path.. ~ Sutra of Complete Enlightenment

I don't know what kind of doctors other people are seeing, but every one I've seen strongly advocates not smoking, sleeping regularly, getting some exercise and eating a sensible diet. Of course most people ignore that advice, and get sick as a result.

But to turn around and the point the accusing finger at the medical profession is beyond unreasonable. I know some people expect the government to solve all our problems and protect us from all dangers, no matter how stupidly we behave, but it's just not possible. If we have health probems as a result of sloth, bad habits, lousy food and no sleep, that is our fault and not the doctor's.

Technology has advanced remarkably and it can in many cases patch up the damage we do to ourselves. However, MRI machines and surgical suites are very expensive things. And of course every one of us thinks it is worthwhile to spend millions on saving our precious behinds. It is an unfortunate fact that many of us have no health insurance and are lacking large sums of money. So it should come as no surprise that for many, sickness is a financial disaster. But if not the patient, who should pay? The doctor? That would put every doctor in the country out of practice in a week.

It does no good to get all frustrated over the fact that unchangeable things are the way they are. It does even less good to go seeking a scapegoat, and it is actually against the law to pillory innocent people in the public media.

So what can we do? The only things we can change are the things the doctor has been telling us all our lives -Get some rest.Get some exericise.Cut out the junk food.Stop using recreational drugs.

I am an ex-western medic and this thread made me actually LOL rather loudly. The advice for living a healthy life is pretty simple, we have known since ancient Greek times eating a healthy diet, exercise, good sleep and good hygiene are all beneficial and a lifestyle of excess is unhealthy, if you want overcomplicate the whole thing that is fine. I am pretty sure I gave out this simple advice many times what tended to happen is this simple advice was ignored and sickness resulted. A good example would be the amount of obese patients who eat badly and don't exercise that developed diabetes, yet they seemed to get frustrated at how long they had to wait to see an endocrinologist at the hospital! well my dear, if you didn't stuff yourself with crap you wouldn't need the specialists help! However, I am British and have no idea about the American health system but if anything it seems to me it is your previous governments/media who seem determined to stop access to care for those who need it, I remember the absolute trashing our socialised health system got from 'fox news' around the whole Obama care thing. 1) This despite the fact our health system is a lot cheaper than yours 2) No one would be left to die of a simple hernia across here 3) Contrary to popular belief private care is still available here for those who want it, it is just no one bothers because the free care is just as good So please don't tar all of modern medicine as some grand conspiracy theory based on your experience of living under one system of medicine